A Book of Secrets by Michael Holroyd

Author:Michael Holroyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

Women in Love

That autumn, back in London, I set myself to read Violet Trefusis’s novels and was struck by their quality. In the public mind these books had been almost wholly submerged by Violet’s notorious love story with Vita Sackville-West. There seemed to me two ways of approaching Violet: through her fiction (and the fiction of other writers into which she had been absorbed): or through her autobiography and correspondence. These two routes of fact and fiction, like the two steep paths up to Cimbrone, intertwine and, meeting at the same destination, could be charted together.

Biographers often struggle to escape the prison of chronology before resigning themselves to opening with a birth. Violet Keppel was born in London on 6 June 1894. The most influential figure in her life appears to have been her mother Alice Keppel. In 1952, five years after her mother’s death, Violet published a volume of memoirs, Don’t Look Round, dedicated ‘To the memory of my beloved mother’. As a child she had been wrapped in the resplendent warmth of her mother’s love – ‘luminous … like golden armour’. She embellishes this armour with many brilliant accessories: intelligence, humour, courage, style. Above all, her mother ‘excelled in making others happy’. Violet omits her greatest achievement, which lay in making the Prince of Wales, King Edward VII, happy. Alice Keppel was a woman of almost obscene discretion; and Violet tailors her book of ‘selected moments, hand-picked’ to match this discretion. It is deceptively well camouflaged.

Her parents competed in telling Violet stories when she was a child. Her mother’s stories were ‘a startling mixture of fantasy and realism’; her father’s ‘intrepid, if orthodox’. Don’t Look Round is, like her mother’s stories, a blend of make-believe and vitality, shaped like fiction, with plenty of dialogue and revelatory omissions.

Alice Keppel was the dominating character in the marriage, its life force. Violet is careful to grant her father some modest abilities: he is kind-hearted, easily pleased, methodical, tidy – a large man of little consequence with a finely waxed moustache and an eye for classical works of art. Nowhere does Violet suggest that he might not have been her biological father. Her mother’s lover, Ernest Beckett, finds no place in her book.

Another area of telling reticence is her pen portrait of Vita Sackville-West. Don’t Look Round was published over twenty years before the love affair between Violet and Vita became known to the public. Vita, with her ‘deep stagnant gaze’, is depicted as being a somewhat gauche and perpendicular figure. Both girls dream of romantic heroes from the upper echelons of history and literature. And they have one other property in common: powerful mothers.

In her novel The Edwardians Vita was to describe Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, as ‘a woman who erred and aspired with a certain magnificence. She brought to everything the quality of the superlative. When she was worldly, it was on a grand scale. When she was mercenary, she challenged the richest fortunes. When she loved, it was in the highest quarters.

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